Baptism as Transformation: the Celts, the Romans, the Upanishads

Posted on January 24, 2025 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

We have entered, in the ecclesiastical calendar, the beginning of Epiphany, the season of the manifestation and revealing of the ministry of Jesus. In all four traditional gospels this beginning is marked by the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist.

The practice of baptism likely grows out of the Jewish tradition of mikvah, a ritual immersion in water for repentance from sin, which opens the way for hope and realignment with God. This passing through the water for cleansing and change resonates with the work of John the Baptist, baptizing for the forgiveness of sins.

The baptism of Jesus, then, can be seen as his own identification with the human condition of separation and a symbolic act of washing it off, emerging, and revealing his true oneness with God. In the three synoptic gospels, Jesus sees heaven opening, the Spirit descending as a dove, and a voice saying, “This is my beloved Son.” In the gospel of John, the Baptist also sees this manifestation and affirms that Jesus is the Son of God who will baptize people with the Holy Spirit. Depending on the account, this beginning of ministry unfolds further in Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness, where he rejects all power, glory, and addiction to physical desire, in favor of faithful service. Only then does he call his disciples and initiate his ministry of preaching and healing.

For Christians in the early church, baptism became a ritual that marked the death of a broken humanity and the emergence of a new person as a follower of Christ. The practice now, two millennia later, means much the same, a symbolic gateway between an old self and a new being, a new way of life.

There are many ways that baptism is practiced. Immersion, partial immersion, pouring, sprinkling, infant, adult believer’s, is it a rite, is it a sacrament, is it simply symbolic – I guess it’s no surprise that the Christian church, over twenty centuries, has bickered and bantered, sometimes even to death, over the correct and authentic way to baptize.

Growing up in what was known as the Old Mennonite Church – as opposed to the General Conference Mennonite Church, where I suspect people smiled and laughed more – baptism was done by pouring. Rooted in the adult believer’s baptism tradition, for us baptism happened only when we reached the “age of accountability,” meaning we were old enough to understand and be convicted of our sin, seek to repent, be baptized, and thereby enter the body of Christ. Most commonly that “only when” turned out to be twelve years of age.

Accordingly, at some point in seventh grade Sunday School, my classmates and I were each presented with a card asking whether we were ready to repent, be baptized, and become a member of the church. You can imagine that it was hard to say no, especially for me, growing up thinking I was the little engine that should.

Confession for me generally involved wrenching acknowledgment to my parents of some truly petty misdeed. And so I felt compelled to confess to my mother my decision about baptism – a misdeed only in that I did not completely trust that it was real. She, of course, became uncomfortably emotional about it, exacerbating my underlying guilt with the uncertainty.

Pouring – representing the pouring out of the Spirit on believers – involved an elder in the congregation pouring water out of a pitcher into the cupped hands of the pastor, who then released the water onto the head of the supplicant, kneeling beside all the other twelve-year-olds in front of the congregation. I was so nervous and uncomfortable that the sound of the water running off my head, big droplets hitting the carpet, startled me into laughter. You can imagine what that did to a hyperactive conscience.

Suffice it to say that, in the heavily suppressed and private way of a blooming adolescent, I suffered mightily thinking that I was a fraud and not truly saved. I did not feel different. Being a pretty good kid, I did not act especially differently. I did not feel forgiven, I could not tell if Jesus had really come into my heart, I felt like I was supposed to be telling the world around me daily that I had been saved and that they should be, too. I did not want to do that. And I felt pretty guilty about all of it.

There is so much I remember with great affection about my church, a true community of faith. I wish that the invitation had been a little more real and less mechanized. But truly I know now that what I brought to the table simply came back to me in that experience. While I wish it had been different, I trust that it has been useful in my faith journey.

Somewhere around 1990, this and other quandaries nudged me into an exploration across global religious traditions. In my lifelong quest to know, to connect with, and to serve God, I could not let go of the notion that our Creator and Sustainer surely spoke in all places at all times.

For more than thirty years, I have read Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and other scriptures, as well as Sufi poetry, and writings of the Christian mystics. All have led me to a richer and more satisfying understanding of my faith. I have not abandoned biblical scriptures or my core commitment to following the way of Jesus. But I have come to view everything about the life of faith as a journey of transformation. Baptism, for me, clarifies in that light.

A passage from the Katha Upanishad, written by a Hindu sage over 5,000 years ago, captures for me the essence of transformation:

In the secret cave of the heart, two are

Seated by life’s fountain. The separate ego

Drinks of the sweet and bitter stuff,

Liking the sweet, disliking the bitter,

While the supreme Self drinks sweet and bitter

Neither liking this nor disliking that.

The ego gropes in darkness, while the Self

Lives in light.

Discovering the disconnect of the small self, individual and isolated ego, from true Self, the person created and already inhabited by God, has led me away from trembling uncertainty about salvation and toward a joyful and fulfilling engagement of transformation.

What does this mean, day-to-day? It means that I practice being somehow more than my body, able to watch the way my separated, hungry, and fearful ego behaves and interacts with the world. It means I can watch and release my ego bound urges to defense and anger. I can see, with compassion, the driver who cuts me off as someone overtaken by their own anger or attachment to power, or just someone who made a mistake, the kind I make on a regular basis. It means, I hope, that I can do things for the satisfaction of doing what I am called to do, neither shying away from nor seeking recognition, letting go of insistence on specific outcomes. It means I can see when my passion gets in the way of relationship, learning to recognize the circumstances where I might run off the rails. It means I can sometimes set aside my selfish filters and soak in the whole true beauty of the person in front of me. It means, perhaps most importantly, that I can forgive myself and others with compassion, knowing that I am loved by something so much bigger. And I can share that love in service with others.

Interestingly, and refreshingly for me, this journey of transformation also corresponds harmoniously with Celtic Christian spirituality. From early times, the Celtic Christians believed in original goodness as opposed to the still dominant Augustinian belief in original sin. Pelagius, a Celtic contemporary of Augustine in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, argued that humans, made in the image of God, were free to choose whether or not to sin. There was no denial that we were prone to fall off the path. But there was trust that the image, the goodness of God, was our true center and we could return to it. Augustine argued that the sin of Adam and Eve tainted all humanity for all time and that humans were helpless in their sin. The pope at the time initially sided with Pelagius. But Augustine appealed to the government of Rome, which banned Pelagius, and the pope eventually fell in line. Pelagius was branded a heretic. Such are the ways of Christendom.

But the debate continued in the northern British Isles and this Celtic Christian tradition still thrives there and beyond. John Philip Newell, a theologian, prolific author, and sometime leader in both the Church of Scotland and the Anglican Church, is a leading contemporary proponent of creation spirituality.

I find it interesting that Celtic Christian spirituality traces its parentage to St. John, and the more reflective gospel attributed to him, while Roman spirituality has maintained the hierarchical line of Peter as the first pope, with Matthew its gospel standard. The Celts hold as a central image John leaning on Jesus’s breast at the last supper. They say that John, the presumptive but never actually named disciple whom Jesus loved, listened to the heartbeat of God – such a beautiful image for a life of faith.

So what does all this have to do with baptism? In the dominant Augustinian lineage, the one of age old Christendom, the one in which most of us were raised, baptism signifies salvation from a desperate and unshakeable state of eternal damnation. The only solution to this terrible state is through faith in the atoning act of the crucifixion, meaning – let’s be honest – the required bloodletting and tortuous murder of God’s supposedly only child. Baptism in this lineage is a drowning, a putting to death of the evil self, resurrected as a new and perfected being only because of the atoning sacrifice of Christ.

In the Celtic Christian tradition baptism is more like a welcome home to the true and eternal family of creation, a celebration of the image of God at the heart of every living thing. A believer emerges from the water cleaned up and shining, having recognized and washed away the effects of a fearful and falsely disconnected ego.

While it may seem odd, I understand the heresy of this for both church and state. These “powers that be” simply cannot deal with a cohort of its minions experiencing that much freedom and joy, especially without their permission and mediation.

“The ego gropes in darkness, while the Self lives in light.” Such amazing wisdom. Freedom and true joy are found in the choice to be free of the ceaseless judgments and grasping of ego, resting instead in the capital S Self. From the Celtic perspective, we could say that the small s ego self is not a different being. It’s just not awake to its true connection to God. I believe, with the Celts, that the difference between small s self and supreme Self is a choice we can make. The journey of Jesus through baptism, the various temptations in the wilderness, followed by his ministry is a beautiful example of this transformative journey. And it is a journey each of us can choose.

Close your eyes for a moment. Imagine yourself as a young child in the Garden of Eden. You are sitting by life’s fountain. If you look up with the innocent eyes of an ego that does not know its connection to creation, you might see what you believe is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. You might become afraid, knowing suddenly that you will die. You might fear that there is not enough to eat, and you will starve. You might believe that no one else cares.

In our fear, friend, we fled the Garden, grasping what we thought was power to protect ourselves. We exercised it in violence, greed, and the oppression of others – a failed attempt to save our isolated selves from what we believed to be our certain end.

Close your eyes again and imagine your Creator calling to you. “Dear child, I have created and placed you in the garden of beauty and goodness. Look, you are beside the fountain and under the Tree of Life. Everything you need to enjoy life and love is here. Don’t be afraid. You are not alone. We and everything and everyone around you are one. Here, let’s pick up this little frightened ego of yours. I love it as my own. There is no need to kill or destroy it, or anything else. Let’s just carry it back where it belongs, here with your family and your people. We’ll be right here under this tree with everything you need, beside the fountain that flows with the water of life. Look, here’s a blanket. Let’s have a picnic.”

And baptism? Well, as we say here in New Mexico, water is life. So many ways to know and love it:

Healing water
Peace like a river
Fountain of life
The shore
The acequia
Parting of the waters
Crossing over
The Living water

I don’t believe at all that the water of baptism is for the drowning death of anyone made in the image of our Creator. No, no, never.

O let all who thirst, let them come to the water. Let them come.

Welcome to 2025

Posted on January 2, 2025 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Welcome to 2025. What do you think it will be like?

Will it be the most interesting year ever?
Will it be the happiest year ever?
Will we achieve world peace and an economy that serves all the people?
Will the globe get warmer or cooler?
Will we heal division?
Will we start a civil war?

Here’s what I think. I think our national imagination is moving powerfully and rapidly toward destruction of the current order, whatever that is perceived to be, and replacement, for a significant block of time, with violence, rubble, and chaos. Increasingly I read about people on opposite sides of a sociopolitical spectrum arming themselves, convinced that they must engage in violence either to achieve change or to fend off aggression from the other side.

I see the photos of death, despair, and ruin from Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan and I am shaken by the possibility, moving toward probability, that we will begin to see the same pictures of destroyed cities and ruined landscape, with the displacement of population, crippling of health, education, and physical infrastructure, and accompanying starvation and disease in our own communities. I see shifting coalitions of armed militia and vigilantes abandoning law and decency to force their beliefs and burn out their hatred on the bodies of the despised and vulnerable. I see leaders encouraging and endorsing this violence, allying themselves with other powerful and narcissistic patriarchs across the globe.

Regularly I hear people talking, in decreasingly hypothetical terms, about leaving the country, taking their money, and running.

Perhaps this is pessimistic foolishness. Perhaps it is my suckered response to media hype, both liberal and conservative. Perhaps it is a manifestation of the fearful little aspect of our humanity that is drawn to look at disaster.

No matter. The important thing today is the choice about how I will live my life, regardless of the cultural backdrop. Will I stand and resist? If so, will my resistance include violence? Will I duck and run, even to the point of leaving my country? Will I stick my head in the sand and do nothing to prepare for a world that I don’t want to think about or see?

I am pleased and comforted, though not surprised, that beacons of light appear to guide us, the brighter for their stark contrast to the darkness that threatens. Jimmy Carter’s death on December 29 brings reflections on decency in leadership, courage to stand against the grain of misused power, and the holiness of works, large and small, for compassion, peace, and justice. Photos of him standing in blue jeans and cardigan at Camp David with Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin or kneeling on a roof with a hammer for Habit for Humanity, remind us of and invite us to choices for light and life, the choice to join and stand with others in faithful and compassionate community.

The film Bonhoeffer, which I viewed on New Year’s Day, tells a story of deep faith incarnated in teaching and action, the gathering of saints who became the Confessing Church, standing aside from and in contrast to the forces of darkness that swept up the German populace in the 1930s.

While I have not been in his shoes, I take exception to Bonhoeffer’s choice to join the effort to assassinate Hitler. I am, after all, a tribal Mennonite, grounded in a commitment to nonviolence. But I am also humbled and ashamed that many, perhaps most of my people in Germany at that time, chose to duck and run, to put their heads in the sand, or even to welcome Hitler’s regime. Bonhoeffer’s example of courage to stand for something so much brighter and better, at a time when that stance meant almost certain death, is powerfully instructive as I consider the offering of my life today.

There is no day when the right choice is other than love – love expressed in standing with the oppressed, feeding the hungry, and healing the broken. But there are days when the light of that choice shines out more clearly because of encroaching darkness. Join me, stand with me, let’s share the strength that, together, can make us that bright beacon today and for all the days ahead. Let’s shine that light as resistance to the power of evil and as loving invitation to transformation, a better path, for all who fall under its spell.

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Salvation Is Not What You Were Told

Posted on December 6, 2024 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Jesus saves. Boomers grew up hearing it and seeing it on signs by Baptist churches and on the marquees of city missions. The subtext was this: You were born a “sinner.” You “committed” things that were called “sins” because your nature was “fallen.” Jesus was nailed to a cross, suffering and bleeding as a sacrifice so that God would forgive your “sins.” God needed that blood, in fact the blood of his only son, or He (God, who remains He in the more oppressive parts of the cult) was not going to save your soul and would send you to hell, burning in eternal fire.

Other Protestant denominations presented maybe a softer version, but the intent was still the same. Jesus died for your sins. God be praised, because if this plan for salvation hadn’t come along, there would have been no hope for anyone for the past two millennia. At least before that there was provisional animal sacrifice that counted as kind of a beta test of the system until it was perfected.

Sacrifice appears in cultures all around the world, going back ten thousand years, and who knows how many more, before there were drawings on cave walls and, eventually, written language. The gods and spirits had to be pleased and appeased to assure good crops, success in hunting and warfare, and fertility. And generally there had to be a priest or other officiant who was called out by the gods and the community as an acceptable intercessor between sinful or simply vulnerable humans and the deity. And to this day, there are those who find solace in some form of the practice.

For centuries, Christian scholars and theologians have argued and refined the meaning of Jesus’s sacrifice, but the central concept has held on tight in the consciousness of the Christian tradition. The idea that his death was sacrifice for atonement has remained central.

That’s a funny thing, and probably the biggest reason that Western Christianity is sliding with increasing speed into the landfill of forgotten culture. This is truly a shame, because this whole blood sacrifice thing is not what Jesus spoke about or intended for his followers. His real message has been largely ignored. This also is a shame, as this message has huge relevance for our times.

Jesus addressed an oppressed citizenry during an era of powerful foreign military occupation and, as now, an increasingly irrelevant religious cult. And his message was this:

He announced his campaign with Isaiah’s language about release for the captive, recovery of sight for the blind, and declaration of the year of Jubilee, a season of economic rest and readjustment to make sure no one suffered at the bottom of a disparate social order. No wonder Rome had few qualms about killing him.
He spent his ministry healing people, often saying people’s sins were forgiven. This is grossly misinterpreted to mean that “sins” were the cause of illness and disability. He was quite specific that this was not the case. His intention was to buck a religious cult that used this system of never good enough to keep the populace obligated. No wonder the cult leadership had few qualms about killing him.
What he was really saying is, your “sins” have always been forgiven. You have not been accused; you have been called. The important thing is to learn from errors and grow up.
Healing, kindness, sharing with those in need, and absolute nonviolence were the entirety of his message. Love each other. And when you do that, you, just like me (Jesus speaking here), are a child of the Spirit, a true child of your Creator.
To make this concrete, he continually invited followers to join him as a citizen of the kingdom – let’s say country – of heaven. This was not imaginary or symbolic. It was a complete change of life – one that should seemingly have been acceptable in any religious or political context because it was so non-offensive. The powers, however, would have none of it because it put people in control of themselves, outside the system of sanctions and rewards, outside the winner takes all economy used by political and religious institutions alike to keep people subjugated.
This turning, this move of primary citizenship out of a state of oppression and into a state of freedom, characterized by compassionate community, was the whole call to and meaning of salvation. Zaccheus was saved, for instance, when he made the turn from a life founded on the economic oppression of others through manipulation of tax gathering, to one of sharing. He was relieved, saved, from the burden of his oppressive way of life, finding true satisfaction in joining a community of fairness and love.

Our times, like many, share much with the times of Jesus. The religious cult – in the current western situation, all variants of Christianity – has become irrelevant, grasping at straws to keep its numbers strong and its economic resources flowing. And we can see government collapsing around us as it jockeys for position in the world and has lost touch with all but an elite that is shrinking in numbers as it increases in wealth.

The genuine religious invitation, the invitation to conversion, is the invitation to step out of the institutional rat race of wealth and power and step into true humanity. Government and institutional religion might choose to follow. More likely, they will close ranks and resort to violence to regain what they perceive as lost control.

The thing about the choice of true conversion is the deep sense of satisfaction and peace found by those who choose to turn. Somehow our Creator hardwired us for connection, kindness, and mutual support, not for an attachment to power and gain which can never be fully satiated. What a joy, to consider and make the turn away from grasping and oppression and toward nonviolent and compassionate connection. You and I are invited to make that turn and live that life.

The biblical narrative tells of two trees in the Garden of Eden. But I believe there was only one, the Tree of Life, with its fruit in every season and its leaves for the healing of the nations. We turned it into the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil when we let fear take control, turning us away from sharing community and toward grasping individuality. The call has always been to remove the false mask of isolation and fear, and to come back to trust in a community of kindness and connection.

© Jerry S Kennell

Jesus Needs a New Religion

Posted on November 7, 2024 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

America is not a Christian nation. America was never a Christian nation. The label itself is an oxymoron.

Christianity died, institutionally, when it became Christendom with its fourth century marriage to Rome at the altar of Constantine and Eusebius. And it has remained Christendom to this day, especially in the nation that more than any other conflates its image with an imagined Jesus.

Politicians of all stripes close their speeches with God bless you and God bless these United States of America. Our money, ironically, says “In God We Trust.” The laying of the cornerstone of the National Cathedral, conflation at its finest created by an act of Congress, was overseen by President Theodore Roosevelt, and placement of its final finial by President George H. W. Bush.

In 1630, Puritan leader John Winthrop, who became the best known governor of the Massachusetts Colony, likened his vision of a moral society to Jesus’s description in Matthew of a city on a hill, a sentinel of the kingdom of heaven for the entire world to see. In recent decades, this reference has been cited in the campaigns and speeches of John F Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and Elizabeth Warren, to name just a few. The implication is that the United States is Jesus’s own bright city on a hill, a community of kindness, peace, and inclusion, or at least democracy. This is an act of co-optation, not appointment.

Christians left and right claim this territory for the United States, and even more specifically for their own political community. Conservative Christians unite with one party, mainline and progressives with the other. All miss the mark. Followers of Jesus are completely distinct from the Christians of Christendom, the Christian appellation having lost its integrity.

Followers of Jesus know no borders. There are none in the kingdom of heaven, as Jesus demonstrated in his meeting of the woman at the well and his parable of the good Samaritan. Every neighbor is to be loved exactly as the self.
Followers of Jesus do not go to war. Jesus rejected violence of every kind in favor of inserting oneself, as he did, between victim and perpetrator, taking the blow even if it meant death. No candidate and few Christians, with the exception sometimes of the small sects of Anabaptists and Quakers, advocate this stance. Violence, in defense of “truth, justice, and the American way,” is central to the American myth, the rallying cry that unifies, breaking down the boundaries of all politics in times of threat. This is not the way of Jesus.
Followers of Jesus do not judge others. They know only love. How many times have you heard, “Love the sinner but hate the sin?” Those are not the words of Jesus. They are a thin excuse for exclusion of the inconvenient or despised other.
Followers of Jesus do not make, carry, or export arms. Christian America claims moral high ground while arming the world to the teeth, defending supposed self-interest while quietly and invisibly padding corporate profit. Eight out of nine parties complicit in the death of an estimated 5.4 to 6 million Congolese in the wars since 1996 used weapons supplied by the United States. And we continue more openly in our current proxy wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.
Followers of Jesus serve each other, not the bottom line. This is the biggest and best hidden contradiction of the American myth. Christians, conservative and progressive, throughout American history, have confused productivity with morality. And they have accepted as natural order an economy that demands the service of the poor for the benefit of the rich. Witness the vast community of undocumented immigrants, tacitly ignored when not openly despised, that cut up our beef and serve our fries, or the global sweatshops creating our comfort and convenience. The economy of Jesus serves people. In an American perspective, people serve the economy.

Jesus brushed aside the Pharisees that tried to trip him up about payment of taxes. The coin, indeed, is minted by and belongs to the emperor. But the follower is called to be in the world and not of the world, living with integrity and vulnerability the citizenship of the kingdom of heaven, a realm of the heart that transcends the boundaries of any nation or empire. Give the empire its due, which does not include one’s service to violence or sacrifice of soul. Give your body and soul to love.

Empire and institutional religion, supposed enemies, quickly closed ranks against Jesus and his community of nonviolent love and inclusion. Nothing has changed today. The conflation of Christianity with America has compromised the following of Christ. Jesus needs a new religion.

Ending Polarization Through Kindness

Posted on October 30, 2024 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

What country do you live in? These days in the United States it might seem hard to tell. Or maybe it is easy because everyone knows what country everyone else lives in. They’re a fascist or they’re a radical leftist. Either way, my existence is mortally imperiled by their existence. And the only path forward is to make sure my side has more electoral votes or the guns to blow away the cheaters if the count does not go my way.

We are angrier and angrier, jumping up and down, yelling, making threats, certain that the end is near if our side does not win. We spin and twirl like whirling dervishes to the tune of unseen social media influencers with who knows what motivations. If their goals are chaos and self-destruction, hats off to them. They are truly amazing and bound to win.

Everyone wants to save America. Here’s a suggestion. Let’s try kindness. You say, “I will if the other side does, too.” I say, “No. Let’s try kindness.” It takes two sides to start and have a fight. It takes one side to end it, not by blowing the other side to oblivion, but by – heavens to Murgatroyd – just not fighting. But, Holy Captain America, we can’t do that! That makes us losers!

Peace in the Middle East will never come from continued acts of terrorism followed by scorched earth retaliation. Progress will never happen in Congress with turf fights at all costs. And when was the last time you or I successfully engaged another driver in a round of road rage? And even if we did not physically engage, how useful was that shot of adrenaline and cortisol? Did we enjoy that moment? Was the burn healthy and healing? Are we happy and satisfied with the percentage of our lifetime spent feeling that way?

No? Then for our own sake, why not take a deep breath and let it go? Our antagonist is only our antagonist if we let them be. They cannot make us feel or act one way or another. Only you and I can do that. What amazing power we have! And the coolest part is, this silly little truth has equal validity from the playground to the battleground, and all points in between.

There were two special trees in the Garden of Eden – the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life. One has roots of fear and fruits of greed, defense, and violence. The other has roots of trust and fruits of kindness, compassion, and community. But look again. They are the same tree! It’s just my chosen point of view. What amazing power I’ve been granted!

Worthy Is the Lamb

Posted on December 7, 2019 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

It’s the Holiday Season in the United States. Lights, music, trees, the gusher of retail dollars and – Messiah sing-alongs. Yes, as a member of the Taos Community Chorus (tenor until faced with a high A), I am participating. How many times, how many places? And yet these texts from Isaiah and Revelation, set to Handel’s exuberant music, continue to inspire and thrill. May the abuses and domination of all twisted religious expression wither and perish. Please, dear God, save this glorious music.

One of the most powerful choruses is based on a surreal image from Revelation 5:12: “Worthy is the lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing.” (NRSV) Or in the King’s English used by Handel, “Worthy is the lamb that was slain.”

The obvious reference here is to the glorification of Christ, crucified by the threatened powers and resurrected in an immutable assertion that life as intended, the true spirit of love and compassion, can never be conquered, whether by evil intent or physical demise.

But it seems to me there is more in the phrase. As we journey from our experience of scarcity and fear under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; as we begin to know and trust it as the Tree of Life, there is always a lamb to be slain. The Buddha asserts with certainty, life is duhkha. We will suffer. The innocence of the lamb will be ravaged. We can delude and harden ourselves. There will be sickness. There will be abusers and victims. There will be war and hunger and loss of loved ones. And in the end, we will die.

No lamb avoids the slaughter. Worthy is the one that faces and embraces it. It’s not that some perverse deity requires blood to be satisfied. It’s that we don’t pass the test of life without dying to the lies.

We can paste over it with Christmas presents and walls of security and comfort. We can mask it with youth and pleasure. We can pretend to fend it off with walls and guns and warehoused kids at the border.

Or we can make a different choice. We can die right now and get on with the real thing. Die to fear. Die to domination. Die to greed and anger, our selfish anxiety and hoarding. In the end, it avails us nothing. Why not end it now? Why not make the choice, today, to shed all of this and replace it with the giving and receiving of blessing, honor, glory and power?

So let’s sing it, clear and strong. Worthy is the lamb, the lamb that is slain:

The family turned back at the border. Worthy is the lamb.
The youth taken by opioids in the towns along the Ohio River. Worthy is the lamb.
Christine Blasey Ford. Worthy is the lamb.
The “deep state” public servant, courageous enough to blow the whistle. Worthy is the lamb.
Jamal Khashoggi. Worthy is the lamb.
The Walmart shoppers in El Paso. Worthy is the lamb.
The Syrian hospital patients in the sights of the Russian warplane. Worthy is the lamb.
The indigenous environmental activists killed by governments and corporate thugs in Latin America. Worthy is the lamb.
The young women lured to hotel rooms and private jets by promises of open doors to the future. Worthy is the lamb.
You and I, friend, when we die to all of this, die to our comfort, our greed, our fear and embrace the cross that leads to real life. Worthy is the lamb.

Worthy, worthy is the lamb that is slain. Blessing, honor, glory and power be unto her.

Worthy.

Jerry Kennell provides spiritual direction in person and by Skype at Two Trees Center for Spiritual Development. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com or by phone or text to (970) 217-6078. Click FOLLOW to be notified of future posts.

Hard Rain

Posted on June 29, 2019 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

President Trump of the United States kicked off his 2020 campaign last week, pouring fuel on the flames of fear, mistrust and anger to reignite the hurting and fevered base that would assure his re-election. During the same week, more environmental regulations were rolled back in the face of the science that overwhelmingly points to a warming planet, with disastrous consequences for not just humans, but all life.

In another cynical gesture, Guatemala, among the poorest of countries in the hemisphere, with leadership grounded in corruption and abuse of its people, was forcibly named by the United States as the designated refuge of asylum for migrants fleeing gang or narco-violence and drought in Central America, particularly those from the neighboring countries of Honduras and El Salvador. This comes as the number of people fleeing Guatemala, for the very same reasons, is at its own peak level.

Wall Street waits on the sidelines, up a little today, down a little tomorrow, fluttering anxiously on the tails of the latest presidential Tweet. It is stunning to consider that the markets of the most sophisticated economy in human history rise and fall with so little rationality.

And someone somewhere thinks that yet another manufactured war in the Middle East will line enough pockets to make it worth the lives of countless unarmed citizens on another side of the globe and a few thousand dead or traumatized soldiers of our own.

We seem the epicenter of a newly unleashed global permission to hate.

But hatred is a thin veil for the underlying reality. As wealth becomes increasingly concentrated at the top, the masses turn to misguided anger. It is always easiest to hate someone who poses no threat beyond being somehow different. And the devil in power loves the opportunity to fan the flames in a sleight of hand to mask its ballooning greed.

We can delude ourselves with the religion of false morality. We can vent our frustration in political mudslinging. We can beam our positive energy out to the universe. If we don’t change our ways, “well it’s a hard, hard, hard, hard, it’s a hard rain gonna fall.” (Bob Dylan)

We don’t need a nasty god to judge us. We are doing a fine job of creating our horizon of hell.

Wealth is not the issue here, nor is power, though the mad grab for both is symptomatic. Human hearts that misunderstand their connection to creation, their responsibility to compassion and beauty; shrunken hearts deluded in belief that they are the majestic pinnacle in the unimaginable scope of all that is; hollow hearts certain that money can buy happiness, eternal life and the exit from all misfortune — these furiously pave the way to our collective demise. So many comfortable people, trailing just behind in the bell curve, would rather not know, turning a blind eye. The newly poor flare with misplaced anger. The truly downtrodden migrate in desperation for the next scrap of bread.

Dylan’s blue-eyed boy knows nothing of hard rain. Rather, it is the global masses in the path of rabid extortion and extraction, fleeing violence and hunger, the hidden but real costs of the low prices paid by the white north for food, clothing, energy, transportation and daily security. These, the most with the least, are the ones who know the storm. Their desperate lives are nothing but.

The headlong greed of the top and the complacency of the shrinking class we call middle (screaming rich compared to the displaced and suffering masses), have now traversed a height of slim escape, speeding blindly along a precipitous and razor thin ridge. The depletion of the earth’s resources, the warming of the atmosphere, the increasing likelihood of massive system failures, the insane stockpiling of sophisticated nuclear weaponry, these loom large and imminent on a rapidly approaching horizon. Yet money-madness and lazy comfort hold pedal to the metal, throwing up their flat screen charades, a vomitous spew of digitized misinformation, fooling themselves that all is well. America is now great again.

We have taken so much more than enough. Yet seeing only the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we sap and burn the Tree of Life, sucking up even the water that feeds its roots in our insatiable appetite for the things that were never real. America, America, it’s a hard, hard rain that’s going to fall.

Contact jerry@2treegarden.com or by phone or text to (970) 217-6078.

Creation

Posted on September 9, 2018 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Creation is amazing. Things keep happening on a seemingly infinite scale from small to grand, subtle to nuclear, still to beyond the speed of light. What’s it about? Where do we fit in? Our vision is so limited and, given the immensity of the whole thing, we mostly just ignore it and go on our way.

Going on our way, however, is exactly our problem – or better put, the problem of “our.” The premise of Two Trees in the Garden is that, under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we became conscious, we woke up to “I”, “my” and “our.”

The “going on our way,” the “going” and the “way” of “our,” all happened on a road of fear. We believed ourselves to be alone and separate. We became aware of death. The response of “I,” “my” and “our” was greed and a grasp for power and control. Anger, deceit and violence became our tools.

But “our way” is not the way of creation, of true reality. It is only halfway. It is not whole. It is “self”-deceived. We don’t know it, but true reality is that we are under the Tree of Life, not the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which is only our limited misperception of the real thing. And that real thing, the real tree, is love, goodness, beauty, relationship, peace, the surprise of creation, rest and enough. Why would we not want these things? How do we get there?

It’s been called by many names, this turn from “self”-deceit to connected reality: enlightenment; awakening; conversion; second birth; born again. And in our despair, we look for any one of these (they are all the same) as some sort of magical elixir that, if we can only reach it, grasp it, experience it, will make us happy and solve our worldly fears and woes, maybe even save us from death. And it always seems elusively just beyond “our” reach.

But it’s not elusive at all. Yes, it is beyond “my,” “our” grasp. The problem is that we are grasping at nothing to be grasped. And we are missing everything. Because enlightenment, awakening, conversion, second birth, being born again are the simple choice of turning from deception and coming home to reality. And “reality,” is “not grasping.”

Creation, friends, is the impetus, the impulse, the word of love breathed infinitely and eternally into the void. And we are part of it and with it, not separate, as our fear – the fear that is “I,” “my,” “our” – would have us believe. And our fear is only that, a belief upon which we act, resulting in our unhappiness, the unhappiness of “our.”

Alas, what must “I” do to be saved? It’s so simple. Confess. Confess and submit. Confess that you, the real you, are connected to and one with the great I Am, the love and exuberance beyond all knowing that is part and parcel of all you see, unfolding with joy and confidence into all you cannot perceive.

It’s a piece of cake, a walk in the park, a look into the eyes of the beloved. When deceived “you” lets go of grasping and submits to real everything, you are alive, awake, born for real under the Tree of Life.

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Jerry Kennell provides spiritual direction in person and by Skype at Two Trees Center for Spiritual Development. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com or by phone or text to (970) 217-6078. Click FOLLOW to be notified of future posts.

Fight the Good Fight

Posted on July 16, 2018 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

I grew up in the Midwest region of the United States. Feelings were pretty much just a bad thing. It’s not that we did not have feelings. We just did not admit to having them. Let’s take that a step further. We denied having them – especially anger. So we got angry and did not know we were angry. We did not know how to recognize, accept and deal with our feelings. That means they could get really out of control. And they could do a lot of internal and external damage.

Now, at almost 66 years of age, after losing the benefit of too many conflicts to unrecognized and poorly managed anger, I think I am beginning to learn. Note that I said, “losing the benefit.” The joy of the good fight is the transformation that can come in fighting it.

There are fights worth fighting. And there are ways to fight them. There will be feelings involved. The key is to recognize these feelings without allowing them to take charge. Pema Chodron uses the Tibetan term shenpa. She says that it is often translated to mean attachment, and that certainly is part of the reality. We get attached to our feelings and it becomes impossible to distinguish ourselves from them.

But Chodron says a more accurate definition for shenpa is the idea of getting hooked. A feeling surges up and hooks us. Or we hook onto it. Either way, it is painful, it is powerful, and it is hard to get free of it.

When we get hooked by our anger, we leave and lose the fight. We leave, because our energy becomes consumed by our anger and we have turned our attention from the fight to the overwhelming urge to satisfy our anger. We also become attached to an outcome rather than a process. We want only to defeat our enemy, not to stay with a creative process to an undetermined but perhaps mutually satisfactory conclusion – the real benefit of the fight. Everyone loses, because our anger is the only thing our enemy can see in us. Any merit in our case has left the building.

As humans, we will experience shenpa. We will get hooked. The trick is to recognize when it happens, to hold ourselves with compassion and to not let the hook take control of our actions.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna urges the reluctant Arjuna forward into battle with his relatives. Arjuna balks and laments. This is his family. And yet the fight needs to happen. Wrong needs to be confronted. Issues in relationship need to be resolved.

Loving our enemy does not equate to being nice to our enemy at all costs or abandoning the engagement. True love for our enemy treats the other with compassionate understanding while never shying from truth, to the extent that it has been shown to us.

That stance requires openness. We must pursue the cause valiantly without the shenpa of becoming hooked to a specific outcome. We must engage with full energy, even as we remain humble and open to new revelation and the change that comes from truly engaged relationship.

Life under the Tree of Life is not passive. Neither is it aggressive. Rather, it seeks transformation, not destruction. And it is open to the surprise of self-transformation, change that is larger than we can imagine, the transformation that comes from full, open and compassionate engagement.

God With Us

Posted on April 22, 2018 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Earlier this week, a man I had never met handed me one of those “Don’t wait until it’s too late on the highway to hell” tracts. “This is for you,” he said, and quickly exited the campus where I am working this year in Guatemala. He had been staying at our guesthouse.

Not a word of relational greeting, not a gesture of farewell, but, for him, an act of faithful mission accomplished, the first in a busy day ahead, I presume, in a foreign land. Duty bound and driven. I offered simple thanks and walked to my office, watching my emotions flicker between mild surprise, adrenalized offense, the dim glow of dormant anxiety, some reflective affirmation for a life of commitment and compassion for what seems to me a misguided purpose.

The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus have been touted for centuries as the defining events, the sin qua non of Christianity. There is no denying their powerful drama. And a million words have been used to amplify, to give religious meaning, to add utility and certainly worldly power to them, whatever anyone may or may not think regarding a greater divine purpose.

Where Christianity as it has overwhelmingly been known leaves the tracks for me is in blood sacrifice and redemption. The history of our human enterprise of religion is rife with efforts to appease and manipulate the gods. In this view of the crucifixion, Christianity finally trumps all with God swooping in and sweeping aside the rest. Finished at last with every failed attempt of the imperfect priest, God sticks it to his own perfect incarnation. At last, blood that is good enough to cover your sins and mine, if we just believe in time. And watch out for that devil, stealthily tricking you into delay until it’s too late.

There is, I believe, a healthy alternative.

Come, oh come, Emmanuel. God with us. God dying with us. The God in us willing to live, and if necessary die, alongside our suffering neighbor.

The distinctive call of the true Christian, the follower of Jesus, is the recognition, as with the Buddha, of suffering as the nature of our existence. And when Christianity really gets it right, where Jesus really got it right, is in the commitment to engage, to join in the suffering of others as the doorway to transcendence for all concerned. In that light, the crucifixion and resurrection stand as powerful metaphors.

I am reading Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. If you have read it, you will understand that I am waking at night with stark visions of unspeakable horrors inflicted on slaves to assure economic privilege and access to wanton depravity. And I live this year in a country where hundreds of thousands of indigenous passed through and died in a similar hell for the same reasons as little as 30 years ago. Last week ICE raided a dairy farm in Upstate New York, Syria used chemical weapons against its own and stories of atrocities surfaced from every corner of the globe.

There is no greater hell than the one created by human forces of fear, greed and power, served fresh daily to millions of the innocent on our planet Earth. We need no other. A tract of the Gospel, of all things. It’s difficult to think of a more twisted profanity than scaring the suffering with hell in the name of Jesus.

The crucifixion of Jesus, the lynching of Black folk in America, the trafficking of women and children for depravity and profit, the bombing and burning of anyone to crush a perceived enemy with fear. There is quite enough blood with far too little redemption.

God with us comes in the hands and feet of those who walk with the suffering in the face of fear, who accept the cross, the noose, the rape and castration, the bullet and blade of every human prince of darkness. God with us is the resurrection of community in the face of oppression, the dance of kindness under the Tree of Life.

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Submit Yourself

Posted on January 7, 2018 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

East, West, which way to look for that perfect spirituality? Such a quandary for the comfortable with time and resources to spare. No doubt my deep intentions are tilting the universe in a better direction, while in turn, that very same expanse is conspiring for my greatest good. But somehow the rubble still gets deeper in Syria. The thugs paid by the palm oil companies are still burning the houses of peasants in Colombia. And the string of cars belching carbon, clawing their desperate way to the mountains in Estes Park, Colorado, extend the crack in the Antarctic ice sheet.

There are flies all over all of us. What to do? We can rage against the darkness. It’s so easy to blame the stupidity of others for the burden we share. We can wallow in despair, sighing our way to the next tomorrow and the next. We can stick our heads in the sand. If I am comfortable in this moment, why look beyond my bubble? We can work ourselves to weariness with good deeds, shrug, and say we did our best.

But these alternatives share major flaws. They are selfish and disconnected. All focus on how I feel about myself in relation to the problem or to the rest of creation. My anger at others exonerates me from personal complicity and, therefore, action. And yet, especially as one of the world’s privileged, I take no step and breathe no breath without exhaustive and violent extraction from the Earth and all its creatures, including the bulk of humanity.

Despair, of course, is just completely irresponsible. I can blame my inactivity on the impossible size of the task and the exhaustion I experience just thinking about it. Focusing on my own comfort at least gives me pleasure and distraction. But these two options also abdicate responsible participation.

And let’s be real. My good deeds are never enough. I can never run fast enough or jump high enough to save the planet on my own. And the conclusion that at least I tried is just another form of despair, with the gold star of performance pasted on it to relieve my guilt with a little smug pride.

The root error of all these responses is that they focus on me, as though my feelings are what matter, or as though the outcomes of creation are somehow, in a very special and important way, on my shoulders. And when I am focused on me, I am too distracted to be truly useful.

I opened with a less than subtle dig at the spirituality of intention. Perhaps that is unfair. Focusing our intentions for good can, it seems, shift energy with positive outcomes in ways that we can observe, if not yet comprehend. As Masaru Emoto documents in his Messages from Water and the Universe, even a positive word pasted on a glass of water can yield a response of astounding beauty in ice crystals formed from that water. Perhaps on a given evening we could effect positive change if millions focused their intentions completely on the healing of our president. And yet our New Years prayers for universal peace – offered annually all over the world – have yet to tip the balance decisively. Who can say, of course, that they have not at least held us back from the brink of destruction.

What we miss in all of this is that we are not, indeed, ourselves. Nor are we just our intentions. We are intention embodied. We (not just humans, but every particle and the energy that binds it into being) are the hands and feet of Creation. Our intelligence, while seemingly vast from where we stand, is just a speck of something grand beyond imagination. Whether we look big and far to the stars and galaxies or small to the mysterious behavior of the Higgs Boson, we learn that everything is always more and different than we think. Our book of physics is never more than a scratchpad of notes in the library of what we vainly imagine to be the universe.

We are intention embodied, We act within the capabilities and limitations of our embodiment. Granted, that is a statement of blind faith. But what is more blind than the borders of what we think is real? I choose – I invite you to choose – faith that the wonder of all we don’t know is expressing itself continually into the void. And we are part of that expression.

I propose active submission to that greater intention. We can engage the gorgeous paradox of acting, in complete rest, into that intention. There is direction available to us for action. We connect with it when we, as Gerald May has put it so well, eschew willfulness and embrace willingness.

When we submit (read “allow connection of”) ourselves, all our intentions and all our actions, with confidence to Creation/Spirit/Mind/Source (read words I use for God), we move forward, acting with compassion from a position of expectation, the joy and surprise of creation. We are not exhausted. We do not despair, nor do we fear or avoid walking forward.

We cannot know. We do not need to know. Our satisfaction comes in submitting ourselves and all our gifts to the intelligent Whole, being and acting rather than owning and resisting.

Exhaustion and despair are the net of our selfish frenzy under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Rest and compassionate action join as one for health and wholeness under the Tree of Life. Come with me, dear one, to the place of wonder and deep satisfaction.

Good Friday

Posted on April 14, 2017 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

It’s Holy Week, Semana Santa. I started it this year in Guatemala. Everyone is back to their hometown, it seems, to visit family and friends. Alfombras, block long carpets of brightly colored sawdust and flowers, transform the cobblestone of colonial streets. Huge elaborate floats depicting the passion of Christ are carried on the shoulders of fifty or more of the faithful, inching their way past the cathedral and central park. The brass and drum corps marks time, in cadence befitting the gravity of the Lamb of God, taking upon himself the sins of the world.

It’s an outsize burden, I think. Mayan women hawk fabulously beautiful weavings, made of handspun yarn and natural dyes, painstakingly extracted from spices, flowers, berries and insects.

No price can adequately compensate the weeks of labor by these women, sitting on knees, the weight of their bodies creating the tension needed for the woof and warp of their backstrap looms. The work is so gorgeous. They ask so little. The market prevails in its daily disappointment.

Our travels took us to their villages, where tombstones decorated with primitive art depict burned houses and hanged, hacked and bleeding bodies of the hundreds, thousands, perhaps 250,000 of their beloved family and friends, slaughtered by soldiers and paramilitary in the 1980’s, pieces dumped into mass graves.

The generals justified these deaths with biblical quotes under a valence of anti-communism, preparing the way, as it has for 500 years, for the insatiable lords of wealth and power, the robes cast off by the killers piled for safekeeping at the gates of the School of the Americas.

I fly home. Three simple words that separate me indelibly from the suffering on the ground. I ride the slick shiny blade of the machete of progress, hacking its way through the friendly skies, bounding lightly across borders that say “No, you may not partake. Your cup is a sop of vinegar served up on whatever stick you can find.”

59 missiles flip their way mindlessly to an airstrip in Syria and MOAB, the “mother of all bombs”, is dropped in Afganistan, this week’s blackbird pie served up for the ego of a spoiled child, daily millions demanded to fund the latest Mar-a-Lago deal, the White House an empty shell of a sucked out egg, the hollow hope of the poor and downtrodden.

Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy.

No amount of blood poured out has ever offered a drop of redemption. It’s just another killing – another lie of the king, sanctioned by the priest, to justify clearing the path ahead. Jesus died because of our sins, never to take them away.

Good Friday.

Jerry Kennell provides spiritual direction in person and by Skype at Two Trees Center for Spiritual Development, Estes Park, Colorado. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com or by phone or text to (970) 217-6078. Click FOLLOW above to be notified of future posts.

Doctor My Eyes

Posted on February 18, 2017 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Donald Trump is not our problem in America. He is not the disease, although he is certainly a very troublesome symptom. Electoral politics and the dash to polarization are not the problem, nor the antiquated function of the electoral college, not to deny that a few systemic tweaks might provide some small relief from our indigestion and pain.

Our problem is our eyes. It’s literally that we have chosen and clung to a very limited vision, an illusion that we believe to be complete and real. Whether we quake in fear and despair, watching blue states tumble to red and making frantic calls to legislators who seem deaf to voices without dollars. Whether we fulminate from the brilliant ivory tower of The New York Times. Whether we are certain that the immigrant other, seasoned with a dash of moral decline, is undermining our safety and the foundation of our American values. Whether we shake our snarling 4×4 fist as big government swallows the last guppy in our hard-earned and well-deserved Mar-a-Lago koi pond. Whatever our fear and angst, we are all, for the most part, just looking through the eyes of our chosen limitation.

And that’s just it, the eyes of fear and angst. The thing that binds us together, the foundational truth of America today is eyes that see only my shrinking piece of American pie.

Jackson Browne laments:

Doctor, my eyes have seen the years
And the slow parade of fears without crying
Now I want to understand*

Doctor, my eyes. They see the hurt, petulant little boy spinning like a pulsar between his black hole need for adulation and his fits of distemper when we are unwilling or unable to pacify him. But he is our little boy, and we put him in charge. We must accept full responsibility.

Noble democracy, precious concept, is not our elixir. Today it is our exfoliant. It reveals the perilously thin skin of our fear, our polarization, our sorrow and longing, our greed, our corporate angst.

‘Cause I have wandered through this world
And as each moment has unfurled
I’ve been waiting to awaken from these dreams*

From the Gospel of Thomas saying 22 or Gospel of Mary Magdalene 30:12, these confounding words are essentially the same:

When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will gain the Kingdom.

“When you make . . .” my, your, our making. When we make our eyes something other than the eyes of our personal fear. When we rebirth our limited sight with the panorama of the kingdom of the spirit, we see a different world. It is not an American world, a Russian world, a Christian or Muslim world.

When we make these eyes, we might see the hurting little boy just as he is and take care of him. Certainly we would protect him from the inappropriate terror, his and ours, of placing him in the most powerful political position in the world.

We might also see the broken dreams of the working class and the hopes of the refugee and immigrant, with or without papers. Perhaps we would see through the paper money walls of our financial skyscrapers and over the bulwarks of our gated communities. Maybe we would see that these gates, these flimsy walls, are built by and rest on the shoulders of the formerly invisible and now despised. And we would have compassion for the hunger and fear of every being across this entire spectrum of humanity.

We might see that promoting hollow entertainment all the way to the doorstep of our nearly abandoned White House does not make for good governance. We might comprehend that the illusionists of “reality TV” can never transform petulance into POTUS. We might notice that fanning the flames of polarization to sell media ultimately burns away the bonds of healthy community.

Doctor, my eyes
Tell me what you see
I hear their cries
Just say if it’s too late for me*

Good news. The doctor is in. She’s got our eyes. They are truly ours. We can make them new. We can use them to see a world without borders. We can peer with them into the heart of each and see the need of all. But let’s not stop there.

Let’s look up and down, left and right, in and out. Take in the beauty beyond imagining, the world as it is without the borders of our old eyes. Absorb the wonders of the created and the unfolding. Rest in the assurance of a shared enough.

May our true eyes light the path of compassionate action with no attachments. Perhaps in this way, we will pick up and wield the tool of democracy with better respect and to greater effect.

*Doctor My Eyes, Jackson Browne. • Copyright © Universal Music Publishing Group

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The Super Bowl, Election 2016 and God in America

Posted on February 13, 2016 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

It was a whizz-bang week – the final presidential candidate debates before the New Hampshire primary capped off by the 50^th Super Bowl. God bless America, Lady Gaga, Coldplay, Beyoncé and certainly Peyton Manning. And fighter jets. And the pyrotechnics. And Wilson. And Hyundai. And CBS. And the pill that remedies various colon related issues that prevent us from success in our daily conquest.

The Western Christian narrative of God and humanity has been one of separation and not connection, a fierce, frantic and fearful individualism. A whole host of problems arise with this. First, there is the underlying sense of alienation and isolation, resulting in chronic anxiety and uncertainty. We are never quite sure, short of less than satisfying dogmatic formulas, whether we are safe or not. Am I forgiven – enough? Am I saved? Is it really possible that God hears me when I pray? How can I get that right and be sure? Is there even God?

The flip side of the uncertainty is vain over-confidence. I am all-powerful. I can do anything. The world is my playground. You just don’t get it. Get out of my way. Stupid you if you don’t have enough.

Oscillating between these two poles, we exhaust ourselves. The existential angst is never relieved, the material satiation is never enough, the domination is never complete. We are a sometimes weary people in need of greater and greater assurance, no matter how shallow or hollow the language, no matter how sensational the show.

There are those that would say this separation, this individualism, is exactly the triumph of the West – that our belief in the power of the individual and the application of that belief in the material realm have created all that is good in the world. We have imposed order on chaos, driven out superstition with real medicine, turned raw materials into comfort and pleasure and, through accumulation of wealth transformed into overwhelming force, assured the safety of humanity.

Certainly much that is good has been accomplished.

But back on the panic side of our void, our concept of prayer remains characterized alternately by begging or claiming – as if we are constantly but inadequately grasping at something that is not quite ours. We need demonstrable proof, sure results. The tornado lifted when it came to my house. Or it didn’t because I didn’t pray hard enough. Superstorms and terrorist threats are God’s judgment on “the gay lifestyle.” We dash about and shout our certain proclamations. And we allocate more money to put a material or military patch on the mess to keep it all from falling apart.

Presidential politics in 2016 reflects the fever pitch of our bifurcated anxiety. It’s as if the deep underlying infection of isolation and desperation is finally forming a boil, a small and intense festering that burns under the thinnest layer of decaying skin, ready to burst.

The infection is spiritual. It is not religious. It is not political. It is not tied to one economic system or another. One candidate epitomizes the bluster and desperation. And only one comes close to naming the underlying spiritual vacuum and disconnect that rules our discontent – the fire that drives our fever toward the threshold between morbidity and mortality. When Senator Sanders pulls back the curtain masking unfettered greed, he touches, without fully naming, our great hunger and despair.

I am not suggesting at all a vote of any sort. No party, candidate or election can salve the infection of our soul. Nor am I recommending that we shut off the Super Bowl. But I am inviting us to see, to understand, to absorb and to embrace the nature of the illness. And I am suggesting we can cure it with a change of orientation.

It is our isolation that fuels our insatiable hunger. And it is our underlying narrative of separation that walls us off from the deep satisfaction and power of existence. Believing conquest and satiation to be the elixirs of at least happiness, if not eternal life, we drive pedal to the metal toward the brink of extinction.

There is a different way, a different orientation, a different direction in which to look. The forest sages of ancient India captured it so clearly in the Upanishads. Through the practice of stilling the mind and quiet observation, these sages document a Self, immanent and transcendent, that is the loving essence of each one and every thing. It is as if the flashing stream of still pictures that create the illusion of motion has been stilled, and the space between revealed to be something entirely other, a space without fear, a limitless expanse of satisfaction and creative bliss, a place beyond need or desperate grasping.

No matter what or how much it consumes, the separate ego is never satisfied. And our belief that we are disconnected beings in a world we increasingly understand as only material, accelerates us exponentially toward exhaustion and annihilation on the wings of glittering despair.

Mastery of our lust comes from understanding and turning away from isolation and toward connection, away from insatiability and toward satisfaction. It comes from abandoning fear in favor of trust, and willful grasping in favor of willing service.

And, ultimately, it comes from embracing our true Self, the Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source that is the light, the eternal energy and limitless love we begin to glimpse between the moving frames of our desperation. We are not separate and fallen. We only blind ourselves with the fear born of our limited consciousness and chosen view. We are Spirit, experiencing the material. Touch without owning, look without lusting, enjoy without hording. There is enough. Our greatness already is and has no vital connection to anything at all in the halftime show or ads or victor yet to come in Super Bowl 51, no critical dependence on the outcome of election 2016.

Embrace it under the Tree of Life.

Where is God?

Posted on November 22, 2015 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Nothing cuts to the chase quicker than evil and suffering when it comes to the question of where or what is God. Or for that matter, “Is God?”

Inevitably, the Holocaust comes up in the discussion. Are you Frankl or Wiesel? And terrorist attacks, with responses that range from “We will not be afraid. Our love will conquer all,” to the Donald Trump trample. And the potpourri of painful ways that life comes to an end.

The answers seem glib. We point to various interpretations of the Book of Job. We give up the concept of omnipotence, because a loving God cannot possibly be an all-powerful God and let this stuff happen. We say that God is standing by – or with us – in the thick of it – or that God is judging and blessing in turn, based on our behavior.

Buddhism has the slickest answers in nonjudgment and the nature of life being suffering. But those seem too easy. They ring hollow in the face of our yearning for meaning.

Inevitably our answers, whether hardline zingers or thoughtful stories, fall short. They are too empty or too full. One answer undermines another. And still, the suffering continues.

God, ultimately, is the thoughts we project on Big Mystery. And Big Mystery is really big – or small, depending on our frame of reference and where we look. For all we know there are an infinite number of universes in every Higgs Boson.

We throw our concepts and stories at it to see what sticks. It all falls short. We fall short. Our consciousness is just not yet that well developed, if our consciousness is even anything at all.

We are left with speculation and choices. Do we choose faith? If so, faith in what? Go ahead and try to answer – you, me, Job, the kid next door. We slam our books on the table with condemnations to hell and a gunshot to send us there.

To what end? We don’t know. We just seek meaning and relevance. Some little path forward. Who can blame us for that?

As for me, I choose to believe that there is, indeed, a balm in Gilead. I just want to. Isn’t that enough?

I believe that when my wife and I dream the very same dream in a given night, that when we show up at the same time at a favorite haunt, from different points of origin and not a word spoken in advance, that there is more – that it is good, that there is healing, that the ultimate word written on our hearts is love.

And from there, all our choices unfold, and they all matter. Not because there is anything certain that can be pinned down under them, but because something completely ineffable has spoken in our mitochondria – deeper, even, in the empty spaces between whatever particles form us, if those things are particles at all. And that ineffable something has found its ways through our synapses and into our muscles, our visions and the words we speak to each other, the touch we share and the kindnesses exchanged.

Somehow it is better that way. And so I believe. I believe that we are the awakening of consciousness in its steady progression into the void, that we ride the very curl of the wave of creation. I believe we shape that wave in all our intentions and connections, just like we shape our images of God. And I choose together and not alone. Where is the separation? Can you find it? Can you see any reality in it at all?

Somehow that awakening contains the full spectrum, insofar as we know it, of pain and beauty, of suffering and healing, of bloom and demise. Our choice is to embrace or reject. We cannot change it.

Let’s join in the embrace. Please! Come with me, will you? Let’s sit together, under the Tree of Life.

The Spirit of Willingness on the Wave of Creation

Posted on June 7, 2015 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Last year I lived in a completely secular cooperatively owned housing complex. Each person was there for their own reason, with the common denominator being affordability. Each brought, consciously or otherwise, their own set of enacted values which, as a whole, shaped the character and life of the community. I learned in spades the difference that each individual choice and action made in the quality of life and relationships. Careful attention to full awareness of the other and to actions that strengthened relationships and built community yielded palpable and tangible changes in the nature and spirit of daily life. Attitudes of selfishness and defense contributed equally powerful results in another direction.

There is a sweet spot of rest and action for our spirit. It rides the crest of the wave of creation – the push of energy into the void, the place where sound and light – the Word of Creation and the Spirit that carries and speaks it – manifest as something new, another beauty, in the world as we know it, the world as it becomes.

I can perceive myself as alone on that crest, as an isolated individual, a singular atom or particle that must fight for protection, the avoidance of destruction in what seems like a violent rush forward into the unknown. My action response is willfulness. Willfulness pushes out to force into being what I hope will be a safe and protective space. Willfulness grabs for resources that I think will sustain me against the rush. In willfulness, I believe I am using my own power to protect and preserve myself and my little space against a scary and unpredictable world.

But the truth is, I have no singular power. I possess nothing that is uniquely mine. And my only achievement when I believe and act otherwise is to create an insubstantial lie, an illusion of security that will crash, burn and drift to nothingness, certainly at the time of my physical demise if not before.

There is a paradox of singularity and oneness on that glorious wave crest. I am, indeed, a spot and spark of awareness, a phosphorescence – something perhaps analogous to the bioluminescent organisms in the bay at Vieques, off Puerto Rico. My actions and intentions matter. They matter because I am, whether or not I like it or believe it, connected to the whole.

When I act alone with willfulness, I create a small scar, something that does not fit and flow in the creative surge. I hinder the curve and curl in my brief moment. And I may destroy the hope and creative activity of those around me, all those with whom I am in direct or indirect relationship.

But when I recognize and rest in my connection to broader spirit and act from a posture of willingness, I flow forward with confidence. And I am aware of the others flowing forward around me. I see their spark, I understand our connection in the wave. I realize that beauty and community depend on and respond to both my restful connection and my acts of intention. I contribute to the luminous glow, the shape and texture of the curl as creation advances.

We are not, as we falsely tell ourselves, alone under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We are one under the Tree of Life. Willfulness blinds us to this truth, throwing up barriers of fear that cause pain and brokenness in our immediate and extended relationships.

Willingness opens to the whole, with an understanding that our creative power is one, a point of lovely and loving energetic awareness on the leading edge of the complete breath of God/Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source as it pushes forward in its surge to beauty and being on the edge of the void. Rest in the flow. Open your light with willingness, yielding up its luminescence to join with others, as far as your relaxed awareness will take you on this ride to all that will be.

Jerry Kennell now provides spiritual direction by Skype. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com.

Forgiveness II: Our Emotions Are Our Teachers and Not Our Rulers

Posted on April 18, 2015 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

“Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” (Jesus to Peter, Matthew 18: 22, NRSV on the question of how often to forgive) Stuff just doesn’t go away that easily. It’s not so much that someone has wronged us seventy-seven times. It’s more that we keep working on the wrongs that really nail us over and over and over. The encouragement, I believe, is not to be a fool and allow the same person to harm us seventy-seven times – the delightful wallow of co-dependence – but rather to keep working it out, keep working it out.

Whatever the cause of a deep pain, our overwhelming response is anger, the desire for revenge and even hatred of another. These are natural emotional efforts to protect ourselves. It hurts. I’ve been wounded. I have lost things that cannot be recovered. There are scars. The wounds may be physical, psychic or both.

Here’s the thing. We need our emotions to be our teachers and not our rulers. We need our emotions to be our teachers and not our rulers. The first seventy-five times we work at forgiving someone in our head we are probably just learning that lesson. The problem is that we feel bad about the emotions – the fact that we are still angry about having to give our perpetrator a Get Out of Jail (or Get Out of Hell, as the case may be) Free Card.

Emotions jump up and tell us that we have been hurt, that we have been violated, that we are suffering and in need of repair because of the actions of another. Pay attention. These are messengers. We need compassion. We need care. We need healing.

Our Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil response is to let these emotions become our rulers. OK, anger, take charge. This feels good. Let’s get violent, whether in thought, word or deed. Whether in aggression that is active or cloaked in passivity. Let’s break some china. Let’s destroy some things, deliver the pain that will bring this sum back to zero. Let’s take it a step further to teach a lesson and win the game. Be done with this sucker.

All of this is compounded by the deep wounds of childhood, wounds that happened before we had any clue of how to deal with them. Wounds when we were innocent and did not even know that the world should not be, or might not be like the world we were experiencing. Seventy times seventy times seventy, the iteration and years of learning and coming to terms with these wounds.

Under the Tree of Life, our emotions are our teachers and not our rulers. They tell us that our little manifestation of Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source has been wounded. We need protection and shelter. If we are wise, we will give true heed to the inclinations for fight or flight, and we will make, for us, the best choice about the immediate and longer term path out of danger.

Ultimately, perhaps around cycle seventy-six of our desire for revenge, we may begin to understand the edict that we love our neighbor as our self. We begin to love our self. We hear our own pain and respond with compassion. We see our wounds and apply the dressings, or find the person who can help us apply them. We sit with our self. Our capital S eternal Self beyond all harm sits, and holds, and cries, and rocks and soothes our small s manifested and wounded self. We gift our self the Breath of Life that cools, the Healing Water that cleanses, the Leaves of the Tree that create the balm of protection and restoration.

And when seventy-seven rolls around, we might just be ready to turn to our neighbor, our father, our mother, our colleague, the perpetrator of our hurt. We turn and we offer, from our Self to their self, the seat of welcome and restoration. Come sit beside me, here, beneath the Tree of Life, with its fruit in every season and its leaves for the healing of the nations.

Jerry Kennell now provides spiritual direction by Skype. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com.

It’s Not Always Clear

Posted on March 29, 2015 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

It’s not always clear, the path forward. Our vision is limited. There are far too many factors to weigh. Feelings are a roller coaster ride from day-to-day, and then there is the vast unknown. If I go left, will I be right? If I go right, am I wrong and left behind? Could‘a, would‘a, should‘a are crying from the back seat and the whole trip begins to seem like a sham.

“Home, James, and don’t spare the horses!” (Fred Hillebrand, 1932) We walk by faith, not by sight (Paul, 2 Corinthians 5: 7). Fear and misgivings are the roadblock, the isolated ego cowering in the corner.

In the three worlds,
there is nothing I must do,
nothing unattained to be attained,
yet I engage in action.

What if I did not engage
relentlessly in action?
[Humans] retrace my path
at every turn, Arjuna.

As the ignorant act with attachment
to actions, Arjuna,
so wise [folk] should act with detachment
to preserve the world.

(Krishna to the wilting Arjuna in The Bhagavad-Gita: Krishna’s Counsel in Time of War, The Third Teaching: Discipline of Action; 22-24, translated by Barbara Stoler Miller, Bantam Classic Edition, 1986)

Creation is the path forward. Something from nothing. Or something new, something that has never been, as the next step from all that is. Beautiful, joyful. There is no wrong path in faith, there is only the next step of creation on the road ahead.

Faith, by nature, is blind. It is not ignorant. Faith is based on the experience of goodness and beauty that result when we act while resting in the Spirit of all that is. Even God, I think, has no idea what is going to happen next. Let’s take a step and see!

What matters is not where we are walking to, but where we are walking from. If we are walking from a place of fear and defense, our steps will falter and creation suffers. If our steps are from a place of joy, kindness and compassion, the beauty of the universe unfolds with us, just far enough ahead to meet our foot as it greets the path of creation.

When we are attached to what we think is/will be the outcome of our action, we falter. We have no idea of any outcomes. Or if we do have that idea, we fool ourselves. We can never know all the implications before we act, or the outcome of a different course.

Home, James, and don’t spare the horses! Home to the Tree of Life. Create with joy. Create with kindness. Create with compassion. Put the paintbrush to the canvas, in faith, and see.

Jerry Kennell now provides spiritual direction by Skype. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com.

We Are One

Posted on February 22, 2015 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

I speak of Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source, one of a million inadequate names for that which we commonly call God. In the very use of the name, of any name, I imply separation. But we are not separate. Separation has been our perennial blinder. We are One.

Under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we hide in our shame because, in our awakening to awareness of our surroundings, we believe we are separate. We have a sense of self. All good and true, that sense of self. But at the same time, We are One.

We think, rightly, of creation as the work of C/S/M/S. Creation is, in fact, the very outbreath of the energy of C/S/M/S. Because we can observe it, we are tempted to think we are not part of it. But even as we are gifted, in our limited capability, to look deeper and deeper into the infinite marvel of creation, we are the very thing itself. We are One.

All of our anxiety and distorted behavior; all of our anger and angst, our greed and despair; all of these are rooted in our shortsighted view of separation. Yes, we are unique in our embodied presence. Yes, we look out of these eyes and we see others and every thing. But every other and every thing emanates from the same breath, the indescribable marvel of mass, the speed of light squared and its energetic product. There is no difference or separation. We are One.

All evil emanates from the lie, the limited and incorrect view, that we are separate. We create. We make things. We buy things and sell them. When our making is isolated in self – when it is self-ish – it is corrupted and the wealth we generate and hoard only confirms our illusion of separation. I have more. That is good. Someone else has less. Too bad. Violence erupts and the only solution we can see is greater violence to crush our enemy.

When our making, our creating, takes place in the spirit of connection, we are conscious that we only touch, we co-create, we one-create with the Spirit of every thing and everything. And our product is a gift of beauty and utility for the world, the universe, the everything of which we are part. We are One.

When we wake in the morning, we can practice seeing things as whole. For me, the simple exercise of breathing in “Thy Will,” breathing out, “be done,” takes me to a place of connection. I am not separate from the creative will of C/S/M/S. Nor am I obliterated or forgotten in it. I am just in it, part of it, participating with openness and willingness. I am being my true Self, breathing, creating, acting in relationship to each one and each thing.

When we realize our true home under the Tree of Life, we are at rest in motion. We are at ease in creating. We have no fight with our surroundings, no fear of the other.

And we are empowered to speak with clarity, to touch with compassion, to invite with kindness.

We are One.

Scripture today from my soul brother JD Martin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q5ia2jUeqc

Jerry Kennell now provides spiritual direction by Skype. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com.

The Choice of Devotion

Posted on February 7, 2015 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Sri Ramakrishna, the 19^th century Indian saint, embodied above all things the practice of devotion. He eschewed study and strict adherence to Hindu ritual in favor of childlike adoration of Kali, the feminine aspect of Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source. Sometimes petulant, sometimes playful, often appearing mad and completely out of control with devotion, he yearned to become one. He whimpered, pestered and cried to experience absolute unity with the Godhead through ceaseless pursuit of Kali’s attention and affection.

And by all reports he was rewarded, after a time but then regularly, with the state of Samadhi, the expansive experience of complete absorption, joy and oneness with C/S/M/S. In the midst of teaching his disciples, he would break into songs of adoration and then effortlessly enter and return from extended states of unitive bliss. He brought back tales of love and beauty beyond measure. Even dying of throat cancer, he seemed oblivious to his physical condition because of his laser focused devotion to the divine, the profound reality of his journeys.

Rumi, Teresa of Avila, Paramahansa Yogananda, Hildegard von Bingen; the great mystics of all traditions have been explorers of the outer edges and inner depths of human spirituality. Their times and cultures somehow made space for them, accommodated their extravagance, supported or at least tolerated their journeys. For all time, we welcome and stand in awe of the news they bring back.

Most of us live in the world of more mundane dimensions. We are the householders, the engineers and teachers, the burger flippers and shopkeepers of day-to-day existence. We raise kids and deal with plumbing problems and domestic struggles. We worry about our finances and the decisions of our governments.

But here’s the thing. Is there really any less wonder in the day-to-day? Is the amazing expression of Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source any less as I turn right onto Montgomery Boulevard and walk or drive to the grocery store? I don’t think so. I don’t believe for a minute that C/S/M/S is any less present or less available for connection in the ordinary moments of daily existence.

In a single block, I see, I am part of the homeless person holding a sign for support at the intersection, the turquoise sky of the Southwest, the courtesy and service of the store clerk as I check out my oranges and baking powder. I am granted in every instant, at every turn, the opportunity for choice and participation. Will I engage consciously, with all my thought, all my intention, all my heart? Will I play my part, giving and receiving with wonder and gratitude? Will I practice love, joy, peace, patience, kindness and self-control – the beautiful and deeply satisfying fruits of the Tree of Life?

Or will I stay asleep at the wheel, angry at the young person who cut impulsively in front of me in the parking lot? Will I numb myself, choosing to be lost in the tedium, bother and annoyance of a world that just doesn’t get what I want, what I need, what I deserve?

Whatever my talent, whatever piece of the extravagance of God I am gifted to touch and unfold for the world around me, I have the choice of devotion or neglect. I can touch a relationship for healing, or I can stay lost in my hurt ego. I can polish my little part with the devotion of joy, or I can miss the moment, the now, entirely.

Truly, we each choose our devotion and practice it persistently throughout our life. Under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, our primary devotion is to preservation of self. We think we protect an isolated and threatened ego with fear, anger, defense, power, greed and violence.

Under the Tree of Life, we choose a different practice. We practice connection of Self; not an abandoned ego, but a connected Ego. We offer, we recognize and realize with willingness, our connection to Creator/Spirit/Mind/Self, the entire created universe. And we start and end by focusing that connection on the immediate. We are clear, we are conscious. Where there is anger we see hurt. Where there is the inability to function productively on a daily basis, for whatever reason, we feel cold and hunger. Wherever, whatever, we experience the deep beauty, the struggle of the birthing universe. And we become the midwife of creation.

Let’s choose that devotion, our home in all that is. Let’s find ourselves beneath the Tree of Life, with its leaves for the healing of everything.

Jerry Kennell now provides spiritual direction by Skype. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com.

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Two Trees in the Garden

Thoughts on a New Spirituality

Category Archives: Human Condition

Baptism as Transformation: the Celts, the Romans, the Upanishads

Welcome to 2025

Salvation Is Not What You Were Told

Jesus Needs a New Religion

Ending Polarization Through Kindness

Creation

Submit Yourself

The Super Bowl, Election 2016 and God in America

Where is God?

The Spirit of Willingness on the Wave of Creation

Forgiveness II: Our Emotions Are Our Teachers and Not Our Rulers

It’s Not Always Clear

We Are One

The Choice of Devotion

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*Doctor My Eyes, Jackson Browne. • Copyright © Universal Music Publishing Group

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